Abdallah Laroui and the Location of History

Abdallah Laroui and the Location of History is the first major study that considers Laroui’s unique theoretical interventions, revealing how his work provides insights into local, regional, and global debates on history, historiography, and time; modernity and Islam; and critique and tradition.

The book is structured around four key concepts of modernity, history, temporality and Islam, showing how Laroui historicizes each of these concepts, thereby denaturalizing them and giving them a novel form and content. To distill Laroui’s critical contribution, the book develops an innovative methodological framework that traces Laroui’s reconfiguring of temporal relations and brings his work into conversation with historical theory, political philosophy, and postcolonial studies. It demonstrates the relevance of this important thinker to a larger audience by situating his work within major contemporary theoretical debates.

Inviting readers to follow and think along the philosophical foundations of Laroui’s critique, the book will be of interest for postgraduate students and and researchers in religious, Islamic, and Middle East studies, political theory, and history.

Nils Riecken is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the ERC-funded project “Late Ottoman Palestinians: Social and Cultural Dynamics in an Eastern Mediterranean Society during the Age of Empire, 1880-1920” (LOOP) at the Institute of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Ruhr-University Bochum. Previously, he was a research associate at the Leibniz Center for Modern Orient and substituted for the Chair of Islamic Studies at the Free University of Berlin. His research and teaching combine Arabic and Islamic studies, historical, critical, and political theory, postcolonial studies, intellectual history, and social history. His fields of work include late Ottoman statehood in Palestine, contemporary Arab philosophy (especially the work of Abdallah Laroui), Islam and modernity, historicity and temporality, postcoloniality, criticism, universalism, and subjectivity, as well as knowledge production in Arabic and Islamic studies in the context of „raison d’état.” His work has been published in Democratic Theory, Der Islam, Geschichte & Gesellschaft, History & Theory, Peripherie, and ReOrient, among others.